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Thomas Mapfumo
was born in 1945 in Marondera, a
small town south of the
Rhodesian capital, Salisbury .
He spent his first ten years
living in the countryside with
his grandparents, tending cattle
herds, and waking up long before
sunrise to do chores before
school. Though was moving
inexorably toward racial civil
war, Mapfumo was living an
old-fashioned, traditional life,
mostly removed from the
bitterness building in the
cities and townships. One of his
greatest pleasures back then was
the music of his people, the
Shona, music he experienced in
family and clan gatherings not
unlike those his ancestors had
been holding for centuries.
Traditional children's tunes,
songs of celebration accompanied
by the drums called ngoma, and
especially, the sacred music of
the metal-pronged mbira, an
instrument whose beautiful,
cycling melodies could summon
the presence of ancestor
spirits--these things formed the
basis of Mapfumo's musical
personality, a force that
continues to shape the history
and spiritual life of his
country.
When Mapfumo was ten, he moved
to Mbare, the poorest and
toughest black township of
Salisbury . Life was different
in the urban home of Mapfumo's
mother, stepfather, two brothers
and two sisters. Mbare was a
center of black protest against
the Rhodesian regime, and a
scene of random police actions
designed to intimidate would-be
rebels. Mapfumo's stepfather was
active both in the Christian
church and in Shona traditional
religious circles. He taught his
children a highly moral
worldview that saw no
contradiction between the
guidance of an almighty
Christian God, and that of Shona
ancestor spirits. In Mbare,
Mapfumo also heard radio for the
first time, and he was wowed by
African jazz from Johannesburg
and Bulawayo, classic big band
Rumba from the , and especially,
R&B and soul from and .
Mapfumo began to sing, and in
high school, he joined his first
band, the Zutu Brothers. For the
next ten years, while the
liberation war that would
eventually transform into roiled
though the country, Mapfumo made
his way as an itinerant singer.
Both in the Cosmic Four Dots,
the band where he learned basic
musical skills, and in the far
more successful Springfields,
Mapfumo was the rock 'n' roll
singer, the man charged with
reproducing vocal performances
by the likes of Elvis Presley,
Bobby Darrin, Wilson Picket, and
Mick Jagger. (To this day,
Mapfumo is a walking juke box of
hits from the 1960s.) His
identity as a singer made him
something of a happy rebel. When
the police came through his
neighborhood one day demanding
that everyone line up outside
their houses, Mapfumo turned up
in the shiny, silver jacket he
wore on-stage. This playful show
of disrespect nearly landed
Mapfumo in jail, where he'd have
been lucky to escape with a
beating. But a cop who was a
Springfields fan stepped in and
let him go.
In 1972, Mapfumo moved to a
mining town and started a band
called the Hallelujah Chicken
Run Band. The band got paid for
entertaining the miners, but had
to work day jobs as well,
including tending chickens in a
"chicken run," hence the name.
It was here, working with
guitarist Joshua Dube, that
Mapfumo first adapted songs from
the ancient mbira repertoire and
worked them into the band's
Afro-rock repertoire. To sing in
Shona was unusual, and in the
context of the escalating war,
automatically political. So as
Mapfumo continued to develop as
a songwriter, his devotion to
traditional music inevitably
politicized him.
As Mapfumo moved on to work
first with the Acid Band, and
then with the Blacks Unlimited,
everything came together. He
developed his mbira pop sound
with guitarists Jonah Sithole
and Leonard "Picket" Chiyangwa,
bassist Charles Makokova, and
other innovative young players.
Mapfumo's lyrics reflected the
concerns of the people around
him--hardships in the rural
areas, young men heading into
the bush to fight, and a rising
sense of indignation at white
rulers who had systematically
devalued Shona culture for four
generations. The guerilla
fighters had taken the name
chimurenga, Shona for struggle,
and Mapfumo decided to call his
new sound "chimurenga music."
Mapfumo means "spears" in Shona,
and Mapfumo's early chimurenga
singles, including "Mothers,
Send Your Children to War" and
"Trouble in the Communal Lands,"
lived up to his combative name.
"People were being killed by
soldiers," recalls Mapfumo.
"They were running from their
homes, and coming to live in
town like squatters. Many used
to cry when they listened to the
lyrics of these songs."
Mapfumo's chimurenga singles
captured the imagination of
blacks nation wide.
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Near the end of war, the
out-maneuvered Rhodesians
arrested Mapfumo briefly and
attempted to use him to rally
support for a last desperate
attempt to hold onto some
vestige of power. But the tide
of history had turned, and in
1980, Robert Mugabe was elected
president of a new nation. That
year, Thomas Mapfumo and the
Blacks Unlimited shared the
stage in Salisbury (now called
Harare ) with Bob Marley and the
Wailers.
As took its first hopeful steps,
Mapfumo sang rallying songs for
the new leaders. But if they
imagined him their stooge, they
soon learned otherwise. For
though Mapfumo had become a
national hero by singing theme
songs for a revolution, his
deeper message was really about
culture, not politics.
Zimbabweans had been brainwashed
by the Rhodesians, tricked into
abandoning their ancestral ways.
Black rule was only a first step
toward the cultural renaissance
Mapfumo envisioned. When leaders
began to reveal themselves as
venal and corrupt, they found
themselves targets of chimurenga
music. In 1989, Mapfumo decried
sleaze and graft in the song
"Corruption." The next year, in
the song "Jojo," he warned young
people not to let themselves be
used by dirty politicians.
The music also evolved. In the
late '80s, Mapfumo introduced
first one, then two, then three
mbiras to the band lineup, and
he came to think of them as core
of the Blacks Unlimited sound.
He challenged his guitarists,
horn players and keyboard
players to accommodate
themselves to the mbiras, and he
challenged his mbira players to
learn the African jazz, and "jit"
songs that were also key
elements in the chimurenga
sound. The band began to tour
internationally, and made
landmark recordings for Chris
Blackwell's Mango Records,
Corruption (1989) and Chamunorwa
(1990).
In
the '90s, Mapfumo faced a choice
between devoting himself to an
international career and keeping
the home fires burning. For him,
this was no choice at all. He
toured and released his music
abroad when possible, but he
kept his energies focused on ,
releasing a cassette of new
songs every year, and playing as
often as five nights a week
during peak season. A Blacks
Unlimited concert in during this
period was an extraordinary
communal experience. It began at
8:00 in the evening, and could
last until daylight. It included
deep mbira anthems, rollicking
township dance grooves, and
refracted glimmers of reggae,
R&B, and African jazz. The songs
decried alcoholism, AIDS,
domestic violence, and people's
devotion to foreign things--all
prices that Mapfumo felt
Zimbabweans had paid for
abandoning their ancient
culture.
In the late '90s, Mapfumo
increasingly focused his ire on
the country's leaders, who he
felt had failed the people. 's
state radio briefly refused to
play critical songs from his
1999 album, Chimurenga
Explosion, notably "Disaster,"
which stated the country's
predicament in no uncertain
terms. In April 2000, the
government received an electoral
setback with the election of a
substantial number of opposition
candidates to the parliament.
Among their reactions to this
were threats against Mapfumo,
and trumped up charges that he
had bought stolen cars. A few
months later, Mapfumo quietly
moved his family out of the
country to Oregon , where they
have based their lives ever
since. Mapfumo continues to
record incendiary music, to have
it banned, and until recently,
to return to and play for his
loyal fans, risking arrest and
harassment each time. In 2005,
Thomas concluded it was no
longer safe to go to . But
although in exile, he remains
engaged, and passionately
creative. His 2005 release, Rise
Up (due out on Real World
Records in 2006), is a tour de
force musically, and full of
enough political barbs that it
has, once again, earned the
honor of being banned on
Zimbabwean state radio.
For all the darkness that
surrounds him, Mapfumo remains
peaceful, buoyant personality,
in love with life, laughter, and
music. He owns a soccer team,
the Sporting Lions, all boys
from Mbare, and scrappy on the
field. Mapfumo has lost many
great musicians to AIDS and
other calamities, but his band
remains as strong as ever,
forever replenished with young
musicians eager to contribute to
the legend. Zimbabweans
affectionately call him "Mukanya,"
a reference to his family totem,
the baboon, and even as they are
seduced by the latest hip-hop
and ragga, they remain attuned
to Mukanya's latest word. Few
bandleaders in Africa , or
anywhere, have been so
consistently relevant to the
lives of their people as Thomas
Mapfumo.
Listen to Thomas Mapfumo's Music
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